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Re: does gcc support multiple sizes, or not?
> I'm very suspicious of allowing users to specify this via attributes.
> Having pointers-to-objects or pointers-to-functions with different sizes
> (within one of those classes) seems problematic, but perhaps you can say
> more about how you expect this to work in the presence of conversions
> and such.
I think there's some confusion here. For most back-ends, only one pointer
size is supported. The only times that back-ends support alternate pointer
sizes are in cases where we have a 64-bit machine but the OS/RTL only uses 32
bits for pointers. Alpha/VMS is an example of this. In those cases, you
often have circumstances where some "external" interfaces (e.g., to OS or
RTL) has structures with 32-bit pointers and others has 64-bit pointers.
So you need to be able to express the interfaces to both of these and
that requires both pointer sizes.
This is not intended for "random" programmer usage.